James Walton Bouska

Overland Park  Memorial services for James Walton Bouska, 77, Overland Park, will be at 2 p.m. Sunday at Rolling Hills Presbyterian Church in Overland Park.

Mr. Bouska died Thursday, Aug. 14, 2003, in Olathe.

He was born July 5, 1926, in Lawrence, the son of Luther and Doris Walton Bouska. He attended grade school in Phillipsburg and Russell and eighth grade through high school in Belleville. He received his bachelor of arts degree in economics in 1949 and his law degree in August 1952, both from Kansas University.

Mr. Bouska served in the Army Air Force from July 1944 to January 1946 and the U. S. Air Force in the Pacific theater from January 1946 to January 1947. He was admitted to practice law in Kansas in 1952, when he became Republic County attorney and moved with his family to Belleville, where he later served as city attorney from January 1953 to June 1955. He moved to Overland Park in 1955 and worked for Stinson, Mag, Thompson, McEvers and Fizzell. He became an assistant Johnson County attorney in 1959, was elected county attorney in 1966 and 1968, and was appointed municipal judge of Overland Park.

He was a senior partner in the law firm of Bouska, Ferree and Bunn in Overland Park from 1975 until 1985. He was Merriam city prosecutor during the early 1980s and counsel for the Johnson County Charter Commission. He was appointed a Johnson County district judge in 1985, where he handled a civil docket until he retired Oct. 31, 1996.

Mr. Bouska was president of the Johnson County Bar Assn. from 1975 to 1976 and also of the Kansas County Attorneys Assn. He served as county chairman for the Republic County Young Republicans. He also served on the board of directors for Kansas City Jazz Inc., which put on the annual Jazz Festival. He was a member of Abdallah Shrine, American Legion, Village Presbyterian Church and Rolling Hills Presbyterian Church.

He married Doraen Lindquist on Nov. 23, 1947. She survives, of the home.

Other survivors include two sons, David, Overland Park, and Jardon, Atlanta; a daughter, Diane, Nashville, Tenn.; two sisters, Dolores Lewis, Topeka, and Janet Grimm, Ann Arbor, Mich.; and three grandchildren.